When Canadian blockchain whiz Gerald Cotten died unexpectedly last year, hundreds of millions of dollars in investor funds vanished into the crypto ether. But when the banks, the law, and the forces of Reddit tried to track down the cash, it turned out the young mogul may not have been who he purported to be.

The smiling boy visited Sunnybrook Yachts in the summer of 2017, after the value of Bitcoin had reached an all-time high, having tripled in five months. Sunnybrook is the largest yacht brokerage on Canada’s east coast. Its clients tended to be surgeons and litigators and C-suiters who travel from Toronto and Paris and Hawaii to summer in Nova Scotia; their wives wear silks and Manolos and perfect fingernails that cost $300 yesterday at the salon. The smiling boy stood out. He wore a wrinkled golf shirt, cargo shorts, and beat-up Birkenstocks, and he was obscenely young, with sandy hair and pale skin that appeared not to have seen sunlight since puberty. He was accompanied by a girlfriend who drove her own Jeep. They struck the yacht salesman as a couple you’d less likely see at Scaramouche than in a Walmart parking lot. Most conspicuous was the odd way that the young man always seemed to be smiling. It was a gentle, unflappable smile. It put strangers at ease; it made him seem lighthearted. It was difficult to imagine that this particular trait was contrived, but later, after it was revealed that nearly everything about him was a work of pure contrivance, you had to wonder whether the incessant smiling was just another part of the act.

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